Two days off! Yay!

Our experiments here were scheduled with a 2-day maintenance break in the middle, which is today and tomorrow. So I'm resisting the urge to do any work at all today, instead doing laundry, Bible study, probably going for a short walk outside later on. Tomorrow my colleague is going into the city (I'm not too fussed), so I'll spend some time preparing things for CKC and then probably do some shopping.

After that we have five more days and three more samples. The last sample took 1 1/2 days, so we should be able to finish in time (if there are no catastrophes). Had some problems with the beam over the last two days so hopefully those will be fixed by the time we get started again.

I rang home just before.
(Long story starts)
One time while doing experiments with Mary in New York, she had been calling home every day, and after hanging up asked if I 'needed' to call anybody. I had been living in the UK for about 6 months at that time and thought, well the last time I phoned my mum was to say happy birthday - no, I didn't 'need' to call.
Perhaps that's the difference between being away for a long or a short time. The longer you are away (or expect to be away), the less frequently you think about calling home.
But then, when I was away I was still in touch via MSN almost daily, so it wasn't as bad.

Thinking back to my first overseas trip without my parents, at the tender age of just-turned-seventeen (this was the physics olympiad competition in Canada), where I received exactly one postcard (after I got back to NZ!) and two emails the entire 3 weeks. And the emails had to be sent to a generic account for the organisation hosting us (there was no hotmail or gmail in those days), where the messages were printed out and pinned on a bulletin board where you were able to pick them up. I still remember one guy in our group received an email that way from his girlfriend to say she was dumping him. No different to a 'Dear John' letter. It was on the last day we were there too, before heading to New York City for a few days' post-competition relaxation. Ouch.

You can tell I'm sleep-deprived again - rambling now so will stop!